Hi,

the "definition" at Magnus' http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/quick_statements.php is outdated. Magnus, can you please remove the leading zeros from the year?

Padding years to 11 digits is not done any more. For a while there was no padding at all in the backend, while some documentation talked about 16 digits and the frontend still padded to 11 digits. All at the same time. :-( We fixed this about a year ago and decided to always pad years to 4 digits because this minimizes storage space while being the most convenient strategy for users.